50% Love Movie Review

Release date: 15 June 2012

Rating : 2.25/5

Director : Sibi Malayil

Producer : KK Radha Mohan

Music Director : Vidyasagar

Starring: Nishan, Asif Ali, Nithya Menon

Nithya Menon, who tasted success with ‘Ishq’ is quite popular in Andhra Pradesh and ’50% Love’ is a Malayalam dubbed film that has been brought in to cash in on that craze. ‘Apoorva Ragam’ is the film’s name in Malayalam and Nishan is the hero in this movie. Sibi Malayil is the director and K.K.Anand is the producer of this flick in Telugu.Let us see how this film is.

Story :

Ramesh (Asif Ali) and Rupesh (Nishan) are good friends who study in GITAM college. Rupesh deeply loves Nancy (Nithya Menon), who is also a student in the same college but he is afraid of expressing his love for her. On coming to know about this, Ramesh teams up with Nancy’s friend Narayana (Vinay Forrt) to get the two together and after a while, Nancy begins responding to Rupesh’s love. Just when everything seems nice and rosy, Nancy’s father plans to get her married and this is when he comes to know about the romantic affair between Rupesh and Nancy. He offers Rupesh a crore of money to leave his daughter and Rupesh agrees.

The trio of Rupesh, Ramesh and Narayana scoot off with the money to splurge and enjoy themselves, but after a while, Rupesh realises that he has made a mistake and he wants to go back to Nancy. But will Nancy accept him? What will Nancy’s father and Rupesh’s friends do? That forms the story.

Plus Points :

Nithya Menon is without a doubt the biggest asset for the film. She looks cute and delivers an excellent performance in key moments.Nithya once again proves that she is extremely talented as an actress. Rupesh is good in his role and his performance is natural and believable.

Asif Ali is good and he has justified his selection for the role. Vinay Forrt steals the limelight with a controlled and talented performance. His character shows two radically different shades in the first and second halves and he is good. The other actors in the film have delivered decently.

The crucial twists in the story are good and they are quite unexpected. Vidya Sagar’s background music is good.

Minus Points :

Screenplay is a big minus for this movie and narration is terribly slow. There are only two songs in this film and their timing is so very bad that they end up testing the patience of the viewers. Though the story has good promise, the way the director executed it on the screen leaves a lot to be desired.

There is zero entertainment quotient to keep the interest alive. Another big minus for the film is the extremely poor quality of visual effects. Right from the shoddy titles to the one or two instances in the film where VFX work can be seen, quality is unacceptable.

Some of the scenes have no meaning and have no proper relation to the story either. Instead of taking the story forward, these harebrained sequences increase the frustration levels of the audience. Though the twists are good, they are not supported well in the screenplay and their effect fizzles out.

Technical Aspects :

Cinematography is very poor and does not support the film in any way. Bharathi Babu’s dialogues are poor and do not elevate the scenes at all. Editing is very sub par and does not give the film a smooth feel.

Production values are poor. As discussed before, Vidya Sagar’s background score is good but the songs are not very impressive.The director does not show much skill in the execution of the story on the screen. A better director and tighter screenplay would have helped the film a lot.

Verdict :

Despite a very good performance from Nithya and a promising story, ’50% Love’ is not a very entertaining offering. Poor screenplay, slow narration and lack of proper emotional connect with the viewers make this film a disappointment. There is nothing for either the casual moviegoer or the serious movie lover in this film.